Where is the conflict of interest, Freddie?

Aug 12, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

I wonder why Freddie is so upset about the results of the PPP’s Congress. Is it because he was proven wrong about Moses?

Recall that Freddie had predicted that Moses’s political career was dead and buried. He did not cater for Moses’s political resurrection. Is Freddie so conceited with pride that he cannot afford to be proven wrong?

Freddie is not the type of individual who likes to eat his own words. He has, for example, in a running debate with Ravi Dev been proven to have contradicted what he wrote years ago about Burnham.

Instead of conceding that he was wrong, he has shamelessly and dishonestly been misrepresenting facts.

Now with the results of the 29th Congress of the PPP not seemingly being to his liking, he is for some inexplicable reason trying to establish that the elections were flawed by imagining a situation of a conflict of interest where no such collision exists.

He seems more concerned about the showing of Anthony than about the fact that a plagiarist has been elected to the Central Committee, something that would have been inconceivable had Cheddi Jagan been alive.

Why is he so concerned about Frank Anthony’s showing in the elections for positions to the Central Committee?

Does he not appreciate that the election for positions of the thirty-five member Central Committee is not a poll about the popularity of the candidates?

I therefore fail to understand why Frank Anthony’s vote count in the elections has upset Freddie so much. I really cannot understand why he is accusing Anthony of being in a position of a conflict of interest by virtue of Anthony holding a position on the credential’s committee.

For someone who claims that he has an academic interest in Guyanese politics, he seems not to have done his research about just what the elections are about.

Freddie claims that since Anthony was a candidate for the elections, he should not have been involved in the work of the credentials committee since this committee was concerned with certifying the delegates to the congress; delegates who were required to vote in elections in which Anthony was a candidate.

It is clear that Freddie is ignorant of just what the elections are about. It is equally clear that he does not understand the work of the credentials of the party of which he was a member in the seventies.

The credentials committee of the PPP congresses, as it is in the PNCR, is about certifying the delegates to the Congress.

The work of the credentials committee is to ensure that the various party groups are represented in accordance with the rules governing how many delegates each group should have in relation to their members.

There is not really here any room for manipulation of the number of delegates since all the credentials committee does is to ensure that the various groups have representation in accordance with the number of members they have.

Unlike what happened in the run-up to the PNCR elections, there were no accusations within the PPP that membership of groups were bloated.

Even if they were accusations that there was membership bloating – and there is no evidence of this – the credentials committee is not mandated to verify this aspect; it merely ensures that groups have the right number of delegates to the congress based on the rules.

No member of the credentials committee therefore has any say in how many persons a particular group can send. They are merely concerned with ensuring that the rules for representations are complied with.

The second thing that Freddie ignores is that in the elections for the Central Committee there is no list of candidates.

Any delegate at the Congress can become a member of the Central Committee. Each delegate casts his or her vote for thirty-five persons. Therefore even the most unknown delegate stands a chance of making it to the Central Committee.

Based on these facts, it is clear that no member of the credentials committee is in any position to influence the outcome of the elections or to find himself or herself in a conflict of interest.

Who knows if Freddie had paid his dues and renewed the membership of the PPP he held in the seventies, he may have found himself receiving some votes.

Freddie needs to do his homework since he is hopelessly ignorant of critical facts surrounding and concerning the procedures of accreditation or voting of the Congress.

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